


They Walk Among Us

by neckspike



Category: Kamen Rider Blade
Genre: Blood, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Gen, If he was human he'd be extremely dead, No Sexual Content, There's so much blood leave now while you can, This is Explicit for Gore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-04
Updated: 2021-01-07
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:47:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28538328
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neckspike/pseuds/neckspike
Summary: On a dark mountain road at night, a tragic accident reveals a terrible secret he's in no shape to run away from.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I'm serious about the explicit gore, turn back now.

Driving through the mountains at night was awful.

The radio reception went out all the time, even the expensive satellite radio system. And radio was all that was keeping him awake. In another hour he’d be coming down the other side and there was a rest stop at the bottom where he could get a decent nap in. He just had to get down the mountain and he’d have time for a break. 

Not a long one, he still needed to have this trailer in Hidaka on time, but an hour of sleep was much better than nothing.

“C’mon, Takeshi.” He told himself. “Not even another hour, fifty-five minutes. You can do it.”

Seven minutes later metal was screeching and something was dragging under his truck.

He hadn’t fallen asleep.

He couldn’t have fallen asleep.

He didn’t remember consciously stopping the truck.

He climbed out, shaking. 

His flashlight gleamed off chrome and faintly luminous green, dragged under the cab where the headlights didn’t illuminate it at all. The green stretched far back and away in a long smear.

Takeshi started screaming.


	2. Chapter 1

Jiro Tanaka hadn’t understood why they wanted him for a vehicle accident, especially in the middle of the god forsaken night in winter. The local police captain had come personally, insisting that he must come look because there was something about the accident that was within his area of expertise.  
Tanaka had tried to argue but in the end it was easier to just let the excited man bring him along. He’d moved into the little cabin north of Hidaka town to get peace and quiet to work on his thesis. He had all his data and observations, more gene sequences of Deinococcus than you could shake a stick at, and he’d been making good progress on turning an intimidating mass of data and papers into a defensible thesis.  
Until he let himself get bundled into the back of a police car belonging to the Saru district police department and driven up into the Hidaka mountains after midnight to look at something that almost certainly wasn’t going to be a Deinococcus sample of any kind. That was his area of study.  
A blockade let them pass at the last junction before the mountains. The road conditions were decent, at least. It was cold but the road surface was clear with the remnants of crusty old snow along the shoulders.  
It was weird, though. If there was a traffic accident shouldn’t there be more flashing lights and sirens? When they arrived there were several more police cars and an ambulance parked well back from a large tractor trailer. The truck was dark. The other vehicles were running but conserving power. There was just a little glow visible over the curve of the road, there must be more cars on the other side to secure the scene. But, why so far away?  
Officers and EMTs piled out of their vehicles as the Captain’s car pulled up.  
“Here he is, the Doctor of Xenobiology from Jounan University.” The captain said as Tanaka let himself out of the passenger side door. The assembled people, 7 or 8 of them, bore the expression of relief common to Japanese people out of their depth who have just been assured this expert will take care of everything.  
“Um, that’s not exactly…” Tanaka tried to say as the Captain pulled him along toward the truck. He’d done his undergrad bio degree at Jounan, sure, but he was only working on his doctorate and bacteria that had been exposed at the International Space Station was surely nothing to do with-  
Someone turned on headlights that were aimed square at the truck. Tanaka stopped dead.  
The truck’s grill was splattered with something green. There was a mass of… something. Underneath it. Hit and dragged, maybe. He tried to say something, anything, but nothing came out. The Captain pulled him again, turning on a high powered flashlight.  
“Old Mr. Ono mentioned his new tenant was a xenobiologist, I can’t thank you enough for coming out here tonight.” He aimed the beam under the cab, behind the front wheel, underneath the driver’s door and the steps to get into same. “I mean, an alien in Saru district? That’s pretty crazy right? We had no idea what to do.”  
They were still standing nearly 10 meters from the truck, far enough back that there were no visible spatters of green for almost a meter ahead of them. And the green stuff, he could see now, the green that was in a mass under the truck, that was meat. Of a sort, anyway. Like if meat was colored with green highlighter ink instead of red blood. So the green splatters, which fluoresced just a little bit after the light passed away from them before fading again, those were probably “blood”. Of whatever this poor, ex-creature was.  
If you imagined everything was a normal color, it would just look like tragic but unremarkable roadkill. Like… what would they even have up here? Deer? He really didn’t know.  
“So what should we do? We didn’t want to risk hurting it more or making anyone sick.”  
Tanaka’s blood felt like ice. There was no way.  
“I mean it can’t be alive, just look at-” Tanaka said, taking the flashlight from the Captain’s unresisting hand and crouching to get a better look. In the mass of green meat and bits of what he now vaguely registered was a motorcycle, an eye snapped shut against the intensity of the beam. He moved the beam to the side. The eye blinked rapidly, tears washing highlighter blood out of it. He moved the flashlight up and down. The eye tracked the movement, able to stay open now.  
This mangled mass of alien(?) flesh was alive. Alive and aware.  
Tanaka’s ass hit the frigid blacktop with a thud. The eye tracked him. Something in the mass twitched.  
And they expected him to tell them what to do with it.


	3. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was not kidding about the gore.

Everyone present had been sworn to secrecy by Captain Shimizu. Tanaka didn’t know if that was something legally enforceable or not. He still wasn’t sure he believed it, expecting to wake up from this disturbing and graphic dream at any time.

It hadn’t happened yet. Instead he was drinking bad instant coffee in a building that had been a medical clinic at one time but had been vacant for the past two years, also owned by Old Mr. Ono. Captain Shimizu had talked him into turning on the electricity and loaning the building for a matter of great secrecy. A plumber would have to be summoned to turn the water on properly, apparently trying to do that after it had been “winterized” could cause damage if you didn’t know what you were doing. And Tanaka’s grasp of plumbing extended to turning the tap and getting water, so he wasn’t arguing.

Someone had gone to the store and returned with bottled water, instant food, and an electric kettle. It was not the first supply run tonight. Today. Whatever it was. 

He’d sat on that cold pavement and stared that miserable alien thing in the one intact and eerily human looking eye and known he couldn’t just leave it there like that. Tanaka had always had a soft heart for animals. And the longer they milled around and called for better experts, the longer this poor bastard was going to be freezing to the pavement and the truck.

He was normally as unremarkable a man as his name suggested. He’d lived an average life, had average looks, was exactly 170cm tall which was dead average for an adult man, got middle of the pack marks in his classes. All in all, he considered himself a remarkably unremarkable person.

And he’d just told these scared, confused people what to do. And they’d done it. Like he was some kind of authority figure and not a man who knew a great deal about a very specific bacterium.

He hoped he’d picked the right things to do. 

They needed somewhere to take the… subject. They needed supplies. They needed PPE. The EMTs had helped him explain that, at least. They would be taking the severely shaken driver of the truck, who was resting inside the ambulance staying warm, to the actual hospital in Hidaka proper once they were cleared to leave the scene. When he expressed shock they were holding a patient they assured him the driver wasn’t injured, just badly scared because of the “alien”.

Captain had dispatched some of the officers for the requested supplies, then made more calls. The EMTs gladly gave him what they were able to spare from their ambulance, and he’d approached the truck once more with the flimsy feeling protection of a surgical mask, face shield, exam gloves, and some plastic bags as makeshift clean booties. They’d keep the “blood” off his shoes, and hopefully the thing wouldn’t spit at him or anything.

Tanaka tried to think of it like doing dissections in bio. He took small steps, mindful that the layer of plastic was making his shoes more slippery than they would normally be. The green stuff didn’t immediately eat through the bags and his feet, so he kept walking. A few meters from the truck he crouched and aimed the flashlight to the side of the mass, moving it slowly inwards until he could see the eye again but not pointing the beam directly at it.

“Hello.” He said cautiously. The eye was looking at him again. “You’re hurt pretty bad, huh?” It felt stupid to say. He moved the beam around carefully, he was pretty sure that was a scrap of green-soaked cloth. Those were the right shape to be ribs if they’d mostly snapped in half. That. That was definitely a hand. A mostly intact, human looking hand. Crusted with green, still had a blocky bracelet around the wrist. He couldn’t see if it was attached to anything.

Tanaka took a deep breath. “We want to help you, if we can.” God, he felt stupid. “Can you hear me? Can you respond somehow?” He didn’t really expect anything. And for a moment, there was nothing.

Then the index finger and thumb pressed together as though pinching something, slow and deliberate looking. A little flake of dried green crust fell off a shattered fingernail and drifted through his flashlight beam on the way to the road surface. That small movement had shifted the hand just enough he could tell the pinkie finger was absent.  


“Does that-” He swallowed and started again. “Was that a yes?”

The fingers squeezed again, then relaxed. Tanaka’s stomach twisted. Not just awake and aware but able to respond, at least a little bit. The accident had been around one AM, whatever this creature was had been alive and at least conscious enough to respond since then. And it was coming up on three AM now. He couldn’t imagine what kind of pain it had to be in.

“Can you recover from this?”

A squeeze.  _ Yes. _

“Will you attack us?”

The hand twitched to the side, a weak little jerk.

“Does that mean no?”

Squeeze.  _ Yes. _

“You will not try to harm us if we touch you to try to help you, correct?”

Another squeeze, slow and deliberate.

“Okay. Since you can understand, I’m going to tell you my plan.” He didn’t have anyone else to bounce it off of, worth a try. This creature should know itself better than anyone else here, right?

“I want to back the truck off of you.”

_ Yes. _

“Will you be able to move then?”

_ No. _

“Is this your motorcycle?”

_ Yes. _

“We’re going to take you and your bike somewhere, inside, where we can get a better look and see if there’s anything we can do for you. Do you want that?”

_ Yes. _ Tanaka let out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding.

Helping someone who wanted help seemed… less intimidating somehow. Certainly less frightening than an alien that couldn’t understand and might lash out who knows how if they caused it more pain. It… they? God it was a person, wasn’t it. They were riding a motorcycle and wearing clothes. Just an unlucky bastard of an alien that had been riding on the wrong mountain road at the wrong late hour. If they had comrades in an invasion fleet then surely they would have been retrieved by now? Surely.

“I’m going to go wait for supplies. I’ll tell you when we’re ready to move the truck, ok?”

_ Yes.  _

He stood, legs aching from squatting like a delinquent so as not to touch the blood. The police were watching him from the safety of their cars, waiting to see if he got his face slashed or melted off or anything.


	4. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which someone is mostly assembled, and it is very gruesome. Somehow Tanaka powers through it.

It had been gruesome work. He doubted he could ever hear the sound of a shovel scraping on pavement again and not instantly shudder and want to vomit. The coveralls and other PPE they’d worn were bagged in a heavy black bag, then bagged again. Then bagged a third time.   
Two officers were here with him, cleaning up the disused clinic and generally being nervous.  
Tanaka suited up in the last clean set of PPE and told them to seal him into the exam room. He could hear tape ripping as they taped plastic sheeting over the door from the other side. It wasn’t like the door was locked, he could just push through it whenever, but he felt bad for them shivering and looking at the door all the time. Sealing off the air vents and doors seemed to make them feel more secure, and they definitely wouldn’t bother him in here.  
Inside he swapped the respirator for a clean surgical mask, it was more comfortable and the respirator was only rated for particulate. He hadn’t made a fuss because he was pretty sure if there was anything to be exposed to he was well exposed by now.   
He turned all the lights on. Someone had scared up some basic surgical kit and he carefully spread it on the freshly sanitized counter. Not that he thought he could put any of it to use, but it was something. If the alien could really heal from this, it would probably be easier with less gravel and motorcycle parts stuck in them.   
And maybe he could find out who the alien was.  
The tote was on the exam table, he hooked a convenient step stool over so it was easier to reach down into it and pulled the lid off.  
“Hello, again. Sorry about the ride. Would it help if I took some of these bits of motorcycle out of you?” The alien blinked rapidly, Tanaka held the lid up to cut the light a bit while they adjusted. He couldn’t say they looked any better, but it didn’t get much worse than the condition they’d found them in.  
The fingers squeezed a yes. Tanaka reached for a handlebar with a pair of tongs. It came free with a gentle tug and a sound like peeling velcro. When he turned it around the hollow pipe part (he didn’t know a great deal about motorcycles, it probably had a proper name) was packed with green meat. He was able to reach a smaller pair of forceps without getting down, and started carefully pulling the flesh out of the tube.

It was morning when he called it quits, the sky starting to lighten to steel grey outside the plasticked over windows. He’d picked all the machine parts and as much of the gravel and sticks as he could find out of the alien’s broken flesh. Cloth, too. In the tote lid were now the remains of two shirts, a sleeve from a heavy jacket, one shoe, and a pair of jeans with the other extracted detritus. He’d ended up using the surgical scissors to cut the cloth to free it where possible, to reduce pulling on the poor man’s mangled body. Turning the main mass of his body had confirmed that he was male, at least by human standards. Although maybe aliens did things differently, who knows.  
At some point he’d asked if he was hurting the alien. The hand had tensed but hesitated.  
“Am I causing more pain than you’re currently in?” He’d clarified.  
The hand twitched a no. He took that to heart and did his best to sort the mess out. He’d ended up with a roughly person shaped mess, which he was pretty sure was mostly in the right locations. The hand that replied to him was still attached, although the arm it went with was shattered and unusable. It was like handling a bag made of raw meat and filled with pebbles. The other arm was in two separate pieces and only one of the missing fingers had been recovered. The alien indicated yes when asked if he should put this back on, so he lined it up as best as possible and hoped.  
He did what he could with the bits like ragged mince that didn’t obviously belong anywhere in particular, laying them like lumps of clay where it seemed there should be more flesh. He laid a piece on a section of bare upper arm bone (there was a word for the big bone in the upper arm but he couldn’t remember it right now and wasn’t about to stop to look it up), but it slid and flopped open. There was a patch of skin on the inside, the other side really since it had sort of rolled up. It wasn’t much bigger than his palm and contained a small mole and a miraculously intact nipple. Clearly this should go on the chest rather than the arm.  
He treated it like a puzzle, to tamp down the logical emotional reaction to seeing a person in this state. The head was the worst. A great deal of skin was gone, a vicious dent in one side. But the other side, that one intact eye followed him as he worked. There was a bit of long brown hair left, too. Around a very raw looking ear with a chunk of cartilage gone. That must be how the alien could hear him.  
He took a moment to swab the blood around the eye with a bit of wet gauze, avoiding the raw edges as much as possible. The eyelid moved slightly under his gloved fingers, definitely alive. Somehow. Not a protracted hallucination, really alive despite being so mutilated. He cleaned the intact area around the eye carefully, even letting the wet gauze rest on the eyelashes for a few seconds to dissolve some of the crusty highlighter ink blood in them. The alien seemed grateful, somehow. He tossed the bright green gauze into the lid with the other detritus.  
Miraculously, he’d found a wallet still in the ruined jeans. There wasn’t much inside. A current motorcycle license, a very expired one with the same name and photo but an earlier birthdate, two thousand yen in small bills, and a scrap of paper with a phone number scrawled on it.  
He held up the ID. There wasn’t a lot to compare but the young man in the photo could conceivably be the subject in front of him. The collapsed chest rose very slightly, then dropped again with a faint plap plap plap sound of air escaping from raw meat.  
Tanaka set the ID down very carefully and looked again. The alien’s eye was closed, twitching gently as though asleep. After almost 30 seconds it came again, a pained little inhale followed by a wet exhale. There was a little more skin on his face, albeit bright green with specks of black.  
He really was healing.

And he had a name, Kenzaki Kazuma.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> there's your nipnop cwaire


End file.
